Prosecutors said fighters raped village elders to publicly debase them.

Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, ...

Frederick Douglass -- The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sorts of parties.

Douglas Adams -- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

At Fairfax Brian and Clarissa clung to each other, exploiting what had happened to them, using my father’s debasement as a varnish of cool they could coat themselves with by retelling throughout the school what had happened that night in the cornfield.

Alice Sebold -- The Lovely Bones

Show more

It forbids people to practise their religion, the young are brought up godless, the Church is opposed and its property appropriated, anyone who thinks differently is terrorized, the free human nature of the German people is debased—and they are turned into terrified slaves.

Wladyslaw Szpilman -- The Pianist

The remarks grew ever more debased and treacherous so that Mr Charles - at least so he claimed - was obliged to intervene with the suggestion that such talk was bad form.

Kazuo Ishiguro -- The Remains of the Day

The two women stood in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English but the debased French...

Jean Rhys -- Wide Sargasso Sea

One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: "I was literally becoming a lesser human being."

Laura Hillenbrand -- Unbroken

"So long as we have wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it."

Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle

Hearing "civilized" languages debase humans ... I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was thirty years ago.

Toni Morrison -- The Bluest Eye

Show more again

If they would kill a priest, why would they not kill a peasant without a second thought, or torture them for sport, or debase them.

Rick Bragg -- All Over but the Shoutin’

a kind of "debased Romanesque"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- The Yellow Wallpaper

Even speech was for them a debased form of silence;

Thornton Wilder -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey

And yet, if my best reason for staying in peculiardom didn’t want me anymore, I wouldn’t debase myself by clinging to her.

Ransom Riggs -- Hollow City

It’s believed that the hollows can live thousands of years, but it is a life of constant physical torment, of humiliating debasement—feeding on stray animals, living in isolation—and of insatiable hunger for the flesh of their former kin, because our blood is their only hope for salvation.

Ransom Riggs -- Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

They also debased their currency, undercut the universality of the iron law, and antagonized the Adem.

Patrick Rothfuss -- The Name of the Wind

He removed the needle and stared at it, expecting something grey or green, the colors of debasement.

Dave Eggers -- A Hologram for the King

I know he’s capable of completely debasing another human being.

James Patterson -- 1st to Die

His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent less debased than that of the majority of proles.

George Orwell -- 1984

It’s interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves.

Ayn Rand -- The Fountainhead

Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilating of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels.

Bram Stoker -- Dracula

Those books, both prose and verse, are consecrated to me by other associations; and I hate to have them debased and profaned in his mouth!

Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights

For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

A debasing war, in short, in which the Bank of France could be read in the folds of the flag.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

But struggling with these better feelings was pride,—the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured.

Charles Dickens -- Oliver Twist

These have no hope of death; and their blind life is so debased, that they are envious of every other lot.

Dante Alighieri -- Dante’s Inferno

Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn’t debase herself like that.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

Everest, the purists sniffed, had been debased and profaned.

Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air

How could she, Ellen’s daughter, with her upbringing, have sat there and listened to such debasing words and then made such a shameless reply?

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

I durst make no return to this malicious insinuation, which debased human understanding below the sagacity of a common hound, who has judgment enough to distinguish and follow the cry of the ablest dog in the pack, without being ever mistaken.

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver’s Travels

The victim, from my cradle, of pecuniary liabilities to which I have been unable to respond, I have ever been the sport and toy of debasing circumstances.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

Can thus The image of God in Man, created once So goodly and erect, though faulty since, To such unsightly sufferings be debased Under inhuman pains?

John Milton -- Paradise Lost

He had gone away rejected and mortified—disappointed in a very sanguine hope, after a series of what appeared to him strong encouragement; and not only losing the right lady, but finding himself debased to the level of a very wrong one.

Jane Austen -- Emma

Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

I know few things more affecting than that timorous debasement and self-humiliation of a woman.

William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair

And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest?

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and chin—a little debased.

Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.

Thomas Hardy -- Jude the Obscure

They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear—something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same.

T. H. White -- The Once and Future King

His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night

He could not make the request; it was debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and sell, and jarred with his conceptions of her.

Thomas Hardy -- Far from the Madding Crowd

But, even in her debased condition, she was not the person to hang about.

Ford Madox Ford -- The Good Soldier

Caricature has sought again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the real.

W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk

To do business with the godless is to debase the work of the Lord!

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Supremacy

’Of some debased kind,’ the other answered.

Rudyard Kipling -- Kim

Many of these myths were created by great storytellers centuries ago, and it is inevitable that in the hands of common people they get debased.

Megan Whalen Turner -- The Thief

Arthur’s people were of course poor material for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy; and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short work of that law which the king had just been administering if it had been submitted to their full and free vote.

Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Although the role of chief was a venerable and esteemed one, it had, even seventy-five years ago, become debased by the control of an unsympathetic white government.

Nelson Mandela -- Long Walk to Freedom

There are men of low rank who strain themselves to bursting to pass for gentlemen, and high gentlemen who, one would fancy, were dying to pass for men of low rank; the former raise themselves by their ambition or by their virtues, the latter debase themselves by their lack of spirit or by their vices; and one has need of experience and discernment to distinguish these two kinds of gentlemen, so much alike in name and so different in conduct.

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.